Covenant with Death

by John Harris

  This was a picture we hadn’t had presented to us by anyone with authority and it was a little unnerving.

  Blackett paused and I saw young Welch lick his lips and look at Ashton. Then Blackett lit a cigarette and began to gesture with it. Smoking during training periods had always been forbidden by Ashton, who was a stickler for discipline, but his face stiffened stoically and he said nothing, as though he sensed that here in France things were different.

  ‘I’m not trying to scare you,’ Blackett said. His small green eyes flickered over the taut startled faces around him. ‘But you don’t really know much about it. You’re still a bit wet, aren’t you?’

  There was an indignant murmur of dissent from the men around him and a hurt startled look from Ashton, but Blackett was undeterred.

  ‘I’m only trying to show you what’s in front of you,’ he explained. ‘That’s all. It’s better to go in knowing what to expect than like we did at Loos, thinking it’s goin’ to be easy. This time, of course, there’ll be enough shells to blow their wire out of existence, so it should be a walkover. All you’ll ’ave to do this time is stroll across and take over Jerry’s trenchées. But there can always be accidents and you might as well be prepared for ’em.’

  He paused and drew at his cigarette, sure of himself, undismayed in his stained and faded uniform in front of smarter men like Welch and Bickerstaff and Milton, who might boast greater wealth and education but had nothing to put against his knowledge and experience but theory and passages learned by heart from the Infantry Training Manual.

  He glanced at Appleby and Bold and Corker, whom he seemed to accept and recognise as men of experience, and gestured with his cigarette. ‘Don’t believe all that eyewash they’re telling you about bayonets,’ he said. ‘You’ll never get near enough for that “up, one-two, point, one-two” nonsense. It isn’t bayonets that’ll win this battle. It’ll be artillery. Sometimes I think there’s too bloody much artillery in this war. All that about the bayonet-man going first – it’s a lot of bloody nonsense. It isn’t a waltz. “After you, Claude!” None of that stuff. It’s the one what happens to be nearest. And coshes and bombs’ll always do more damage than a bayonet. A man might recover from a bayonet in the guts but it takes a strong man to live through a bomb going up on his belt buckle.’

  He paused to let this fact sink in, then he swung round, staring at us with those bright ugly green eyes of his, faintly contemptuous, as though he didn’t have much time for us, in spite of belonging to us, in spite of out vaunted training.

  ‘Besides,’ he concluded, ‘you’ll never get near enough to stick your bayonet in ’em. You wait and see. You’ll see a few different-shaped ’ats over the next traverse and that’ll be it. If you’re quick with your bombs, you’ll get ’em; if you’re not, then they’ll get you, and rotten ’ard luck too.’

  We flung ourselves down exhausted. The woods around us grew silent with the approach of evening, and the larks stopped their singing and fell to earth among the tussocks of grass. You could hear the faint hum of an aeroplane somewhere and there were brown smudges in the air where the smoke of cooking fires rose up under the trees.

  Just up the slope we could see the Colinqueau family moving about their evening chores, one unspeaking old man in sabots and corduroys, with hatred in his eyes and a frizz of beard round his chin, and a group of women in black – his wife, his mother and his daughters – all clinging to their battered farmhouse with its blistered green shutters with the desperation of shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft – as though they feared that if they lost their grip on it they’d drown.

  They hung on with their few pigs and hens, a goat and the sole remaining, creaking, high-wheeled hooded cart that hadn’t been requisitioned or destroyed. We all knew they called us ‘Les autres Boches’ when they thought we weren’t listening or couldn’t understand. They were a silent lot, depending for their existence it seemed on the number of œufs they sold us. The grandmother, a lined and wrinkled ancient of eighty odd, was supposed to be the daughter of one of Napoleon’s dragoons who’d fought at Waterloo, and she was reputed to have fought for her life and her honour when the Bavarians had walked through in 1870.

  They were a shrewd hard-headed crowd, and it wasn’t difficult to guess they hid their wealth in stockings and put on an outward appearance of poverty for our benefit. For all the sabots and the tumbledown farmhouse and the ragged clothes worn by the nut-brown daughters who went with the water-carts to the pump – sturdy silent women with black hair, as solid as the ancient Percheron they led – they all seemed to enjoy their nip of calvados at night and didn’t seem to go short of food, not even with the countryside teeming with half a million British soldiers all trying to buy against them.

  Murray watched them for a while, lying flat on his back, his feet on a box.

  ‘You know,’ he said thoughtfully, his mind far away from the Colinqueaus, ‘I think that new bloke’s a bit of tray bon. The bayonet instructors would go absolutely fanti if they heard him, wouldn’t they? He sounded as mad as a maggot.’

  His language, we’d noticed, had suddenly become larded with the old soldiers’ slang he’d picked up from the men we bumped into occasionally in the battered little townships behind the line – Colincamps, Hébuterne and Hamel – and he’d absorbed a lot of their mannerisms, their professional air of off-handedness, their casual attitude to the war, which never quite managed to mask the keenness he felt underneath.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on slowly. ‘I honestly think he’s got something. I really do.’

  Locky grinned. ‘I’m sure it’s better,’ he said, ‘to throw a bomb than to go into a vulgar brawl with a bayonet. I never really did fancy that.’

  ‘“Going up on his belt buckle,”’ Murray chortled. ‘That’s a good one.’

  ‘We should be so damn’ good when we’ve finished this lot,’ MacKinley said angrily in his nasal Canadian voice, ‘we should walk through ’em.’

  We were not only proud of our skill but, with the sureness of men who’d never been in battle, we were growing cocky and impatient. We considered it was time somebody decided to let us have a go.

  ‘There was a fight in the village today,’ Catchpole said. He was sitting under the hedge, cleaning out his mess tin with a piece of bread, doing the job carefully, as though it were a matter of great moment that he should rid it of every last trace of grease.

  ‘Who between?’ Murray asked.

  ‘New crowd,’ Catchpole looked up again. ‘Got mixed up with a bunch from the north in Belgium. They were in the estaminet and the new chaps didn’t like ’em jeering.’

  ‘Neither would I,’ Murray said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, the usual. Fists and belts and boots started flying and one of the tables got smashed and they ended up by heaving bits of the marble top at each other. Then the redcaps came along and put the place out of bounds and marched off a few prisoners. Mostly the old sweats.’

  Murray nodded sympathetically. ‘They think they know everything,’ he said.

  We hadn’t much time for the old soldiers’ cynicism. They called the enemy ‘Fritz’ and never ‘the Hun’ as people did at home, and they seemed to hate the staff and the lines of communication troops more than they did the Germans.

  The staff always tried to keep them well away from us – so that their cynicism wouldn’t taint us, I suppose – but it wasn’t easy, and we always resented their cockiness. After all, they weren’t the only ones who’d been under fire. A few shrapnel shells had once burst with a series of loud elastic twangs in the field next to ours, and we’d all dived panic-stricken under the hedges for shelter, forgetting they’d be no more use against the singing bullets than paper. But afterwards, when we were on our feet again, watching the cotton wool smoke-puffs fading away almost reluctantly, and had got over the first fright, we’d decided being under fire wasn’t too bad after all, and we’d felt big and bold and brave and noisy, and ready to resent any suggestion that we wer
e untested by war.

  The light faded further and the glimmer filtering through the trees from the cookhouse fires edged the crouching, sprawling men with red-gold light. Someone was singing quietly in the hollow behind the barn:

  ‘Wash me in the water that you washed your dirty daughter,

  And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wa-a-all.’

  Somewhere behind the house the pigeons were croo-crooing and you could hear old Colinqueau pushing the pigs inside, and Eph Lott chirruping over his crown-and-anchor board. ‘Come on, my lucky lads. All weighed, all paid? If you don’t begin to speculate you can’t afford to fornicate. ’Ow about one on the old mud-’ooke?’

  A machine gun rattled somewhere in the distance and we all turned our heads to look. Then Murray sat back again and took his legs from the box.

  ‘We’ll go north after the breakthrough,’ he said.

  ‘Who says?’ Catchpole demanded disconcertingly.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious.’ Murray gestured. ‘We’ll go up round the back of the Germans and cut ’em off.’

  ‘I suppose you had that straight from Sir Douglas Haig himself?’

  ‘Don’t be barmy, man,’ Murray said, beginning to get angry. ‘It’s the only way. Outflank ’em. The number we capture simply depends on how fast we can move.’

  Locky turned his head slowly. ‘It occurs to me,’ he said, ‘that with the front stretching right from the North Sea to the Vosges, it’s got to be quite a battle to outflank anyone.’

  Murray gave him the pained tired look of a schoolteacher with a particularly stupid pupil. ‘Well, it is going to be quite a battle, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’ve only got to look around.’

  ‘What would Napoleon have done under the same circumstances, Professor Williams?’

  ‘Hand it over to the leader-writers. They always know what to do.’

  ‘We’ll be through ’em like a dose of salts,’ Murray said. ‘We’ve got the guns. We’ve got the men…’

  ‘“We’ve got the money too,”’ Locky quoted with a grin.

  Henry Oakley sat up. ‘Providence marches with the big battalions,’ he said sharply.

  ‘That was before the machine gun,’ Mason joined in. ‘The balance of power’s shifted somewhat these days. Wars are different.’

  ‘Why?’ Locky said. ‘Men seem to get killed just the same.’

  ‘What’s the odds, anyway?’ Mason shrugged. ‘We’ve got to have a go because of Verdun.’

  ‘My God,’ Catchpole said admiringly. ‘You lot are wasted here. You could earn thousands working for the Win-the-War Department of the Daily Mail.’

  As dusk came, the rumble of wheels started.

  ‘They’re at it again,’ Locky said, lifting his head.

  The wheels were both ours and the Germans’. Supplies of men and machines had begun to move up unseen in the darkness.

  There was a sudden flurry of guns from somewhere in front of us that made us all sit up, and in the fading light you could see the flashes touching the underside of the clouds away to the north, where they were still battling it out in raids and scuffles along the Vimy Ridge.

  Murray was staring towards the horizon, his eyes glittering and angry. He dragged at a handful of grass and tossed it savagely away from him.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he exploded. ‘When are we going to have a go at the tronchay? We’ve been here days now. The bloody war’ll be over before we get a chance, at this rate. We can’t wait too long. We’ll grow stale. I’m damned if I want to be over-trained. I came out here to fight the Germans, not imaginary enemies in imaginary trenches behind imaginary barrages.’

  Sergeant Corker had come up behind him in the dusk and stood with his hands on his hips, grinning. ‘Did yer?’ he said loudly. ‘Well, now’s yer chance.’

  Murray bounded to his feet in a single movement, as though someone had released a spring under him.

  ‘Sarge,’ he asked, ‘have orders come through? Are we going up?’

  Immediately, we were all round Corker, excited, eager, noisy with questions.

  ‘Come on, Sarge,’ Murray demanded plaintively. ‘Let’s have it. Have you heard something?’

  Corker grinned. ‘Yes, you ’orrible bloodthirsty little man, you. Tomorrow night we’re sending ten officers and twenty-five NCOs into the line under Captain Ashton. The colonel’s going up tonight and he’ll be up there waiting to put out the red carpet.’

  Mason began to chirrup with glee, and Murray scowled.

  ‘Officers?’ he said. ‘NCOs? What’s wrong with us? What’s wrong with the men?’

  Corker grinned again, his boozy face merry, tormenting him as he always did, enjoying his boyish eagerness.

  ‘They will be accompanied,’ he announced portentously, ‘by a group of ’and-picked brutal and licentious soldiery. And I ’ope you’re one of ’em, young Murray, you noisy talkative newspaper reporter, you, because if you are, you’ll find yourself in the line alongside the Worcesters, getting to know what it’s all about. And I hope you bloomin’ well enjoy it.’

  3

  Four ancient, grey-painted London buses drew up in the lane behind Colinqueau Farm the next evening and, watched by those who weren’t going into the line, those of us who were slowly began to climb aboard. A guide had come with the buses, a laconic second lieutenant with a Worcester badge and a muddy goatskin coat, who stood alongside Ashton and watched us file past with an expressionless face.

  The evening was cold and there was rain in the air. It had been cheerless all day, and the breeze stirred the skirts of our coats and made us stamp our feet as we waited, leaning on our rifles and loaded down like pack mules. The officers fidgeted nervously with their holsters, but I noticed that Blackett had exchanged his revolver for a Lee Metford.

  ‘Don’t muck about with a revolver,’ he was telling young Welch who, with his smooth schoolboy’s face, looked like a child alongside him. ‘It won’t shoot straight and like as not you’ll blow your own ’ead off.’

  Someone had turned out the band for a lark, and they were playing ‘Yorkshire Johnny’ in their shirtsleeves as we climbed aboard. Curiously enough, there was none of the noisy chaffing that I’d expected, and no skylarking. Everyone seemed to be brooding a little and even the occasional catcall seemed a little unfunny and forced. I could see Locky looking thoughtful and Murray a little white and strained. Mason was unusually quiet and even Eph’s cheerful ribaldry had an element of nervousness about it.

  I wondered if they were suffering from the same sudden fears that had come upon me. We’d been itching to get at the Germans from the day we’d landed in France, sure of ourselves and our ability, but now, abruptly, faced with what we’d been praying for, everything seemed different. I suddenly began to wonder if we were as good as we thought we were. We’d got physique and intelligence, sure enough, and I thought we had our fair share of courage; but, looking back on it, our training still seemed a little threadbare in spite of the time we’d spent on it, and we hadn’t the years of experience behind us that the Germans had, nor the instinct of generations of conscripts. Our morale was all right – it was probably the best part of us – but we’d been only playing at war up to now.

  Most of the men about me seemed to be carrying far too much kit, I thought. I’d come to the conclusion long since that it was going to be a pretty sparse existence in the trenches and I’d stripped mine down to its essentials, even dumping my spare shirt and socks. Three stone was a lot to carry, I decided, but I’d had no home to get me used to all the little luxuries a man likes to cling to; I’d got years of living in digs behind me and I’d never gone in for extras.

  The music the band was churning out grew sprightlier as we dumped our rifles and packs and tried to sit in comfort, strung about like Christmas trees. Then there was a cheer as the engines roared into life and we began to rock and sway down the lane towards the main road.

  As we left Rippy behind us, we passed shell-smashed cottages where the roofs
had fallen in and the wallpaper, saturated by the rain, had mouldered and was peeling from the walls. The floors were covered with broken bricks, tiles, smashed beams, laths and disintegrating plaster. Odd pieces of furniture remained, too damaged for soldiers to scrounge to grace their billets, twisted iron beds, and large rags which had once been clothes or sheets. Here and there were damp-stained photographs, scattered letters in faded ink fluttering in the corners, broken toys, bits of smashed vases, sometimes a dead cat or dog.

  ‘Mice have been at that lot,’ Eph said laconically.

  I was anxious to acquit myself well, and I was curious, as I struggled with my feelings, to see whether I’d be afraid. I’d heard so much about shell-fire, I was wondering if I could stand up to it. Those few shells that had dropped in the next field had made us feel pretty tough and soldierly at the time, but now, thinking about it, I realised we’d all made more of them than they warranted.

  From time to time the bus skidded on the pavé road. The cobbles were shining now in a light rain which had begun to fall, and once, on a corner, its stern slid sideways into a tree and the thump passed shuddering all the way through its structure to the passengers. The driver showed no sign of stopping and we all cheered with excitement and nervousness.

  As we rolled eastwards, the dusk grew deeper and we could see the trees alongside the road lit from time to time as the glare of the flashes up ahead caught the rainwet boles. Several times we stopped for no apparent reason and we could hear the rumble of guns up ahead of us on the wind, and once, quite distinctly like rending cloth, the rattle of a machine gun.